Elisabeth Sussman at the media preview (speaking for herself and co-curator Jay Sanders): "We share a common problem. We know exactly what we want to do, and we want to do everything all the time.”

Everything is just about as hard to do as Nothing. Together they form a daunting dialectic, a binary of either total presence or total absence, total immersion or total negation, the one essentially necessitating its opposite. It seems a reasonable starting point for the alternate filling/emptying of a museum with images, sounds, light and action. With an emphasis on exploration and process, on film programs for each artist screened for one week, dance companies in residence for two weeks, itinerant musical and fashion performers, a polymorphous pursuit of recombinant activity, the 2012 Biennial exists on the heady continuum of Be Here Now/Be Here Never/Be Here Always. It's the Baba Ram Dass of exhibitions and would happily Catalog the Whole Earth if you let it. With artwork that generously bleeds into realms of the organic, the scientific and the encyclopedic, this Biennial is also the closest in recent memory to connote a contemporary Wunderkammer.

The 2012 Whitney Biennial held a well attended media preview today and also allowed Sotheby's auction house, one of the exhibition's major corporate sponsors, to host a private preview reception this evening.

Also today, a hoax website appeared online, http://whitney2012.org/, seemingly a direct intervention by art hacktivists, possibly the Yes Men or Arts and Labor, a “working group” of Occupy Wall Street.

It announces that the Biennial has broken ties with both Sotheby's and another corporate sponsor, Deutsche Bank, and returned their money. Reasons cited are the lockout of unionized art handlers and secondary market speculation by Sotheby's, and mortgage fraud by Deutsche Bank.

MASSIVE LEAK REVEALS CRIMINALITY, PARANOIA AMONG CORPORATE TITANS
Dow pays "strategic intelligence" firm to spy on Yes Men and grassroots activists. Takeaway: movement is on the right track!

WikiLeaks begins to publish today over five million e-mails obtained by Anonymous from "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The emails, which reveal everything from sinister spy tactics to an insider trading scheme with Goldman Sachs (see below), also include several discussions of the Yes Men and Bhopal activists. (Bhopal activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India, that led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage.)

Many of the Bhopal-related emails, addressed from Stratfor to Dow and Union Carbide public relations directors, reveal concern that, in the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, the Bhopal issue might be expanded into an effective systemic critique of corporate rule, and speculate at length about why this hasn't yet happened—providing a fascinating window onto what at least some corporate types fear most from activists.